


The Princess of the Citadel

by whoremet



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-20
Updated: 2019-11-20
Packaged: 2021-02-16 06:44:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21503587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whoremet/pseuds/whoremet
Summary: If the war boys and the gearheads are Chrome, then she is glass. Forged from the desolate landscape, carefully melted and blown into something more beautiful, but oh so fragile. Her mother had been Joe’s wife in the world before, when the grass grew and trees bloomed, before the wars and the killing that stained the sand red and rusted. She was never part of his harem, she was his queen. She gave him Rictus, then Chiara was born after three dead daughters. She is the only daughter that has lived past her bleeding, the others were crippled with cancer and the radiation that plagues our rotten earth.We are a husk of a people, and I am the princess of diseaseNux x OC
Relationships: Nux (Mad Max)/Original Character(s), Nux (Mad Max)/Original Female Character(s), Nux (Mad Max)/Reader
Comments: 3
Kudos: 16





	The Princess of the Citadel

Chiara was born to a land of decay and despair. She is one of the lucky ones, the daughter of an immortal God. Bathed in water and fresh fruits. The brides were also lucky, all clothed in white prisons until Joe saw fit to be rid of them. He had never given Chiara white to wear, but then again he had never given her anything. The girl could not fight like Rictus, she could not inherit, or fix engines. The only woman good for anything other than giving heirs was Furiosa. Chiara was not Furiosa, nor could she ever be. It had always been Miss Giddy who had been mother and father to the Chiara. The old witch of the Citadel, she knew how to read the old papers which contained stories made of nothing but ink. She knew how to brew healing tea, and sew new clothes for Joe’s children, Chiara was close to believing that Miss Giddy knew everything. When she had been young and climbing the walls of the garden the girl had fallen and broken her arm, Rather than caring for her Miss Giddy had scorned and made a ten-year-old splint her own arm. It may have seemed cruel in the old world, but war pups would be left for dead where Chiara was given the ingredients for a balm, she only had to make it herself. After the month was gone she climbed again. Female, and weak as Chiara may have been, she still had the new world gasoline flowing through her veins. It would not let her keep still, so she climbed again. New world children are made tough and hard to withstand the unforgiving desert. Chiara was no different.

  
  
  
  


Chiara spent her days in the library or the garden with Miss Giddy, the wives and Furiosa. Miss Giddy was fond of the wives, she was like a mother to them, always there to help get the new ones adjusted, always watching with teary eyes when the old were sent away.

  
  
  
  


“Has the cotton grown yet?” asked Toast, who was in desperate need of a new scarf. Her old one was torn and stained with dirt. She held her watering can up and jostled it lightly to see if there was any water left.

“The pups are picking it as we speak, there should be enough left over for new dresses.” the wives did not stir. They would rather wear rags than Joe’s bridal dresses. Their clothes were pure and untouched while Chiara’s were dipped in red berries so that she blazed like the last sliver of the setting sun burning across the plains like fire. Miss Giddy had named her Chiara, Joe had named her Cloud. The wives all called her Chiara and she thought it was more fitting, more fitting than Cloud. Joe was anything but creative; when his daughter was born he had seen the black crown of curls on her head and given her that name. Now the curls really did resemble like a cloud, floating freely and aimlessly around her ears. The wives went wordlessly back to turning the earth. They did not need to work in the gardens, but it was better for the wives than staying trapped behind six inches of steel all day. When they left they were forced into chastity belts, ugly yellow fangs scaring off any wandering gazes. But the belts were pointless, no one would ever dare lay a finger on Joe’s treasures.

“Alright, hour is gone, time to return lovelies.” Chiara grimaced at them as they grumbled and threw their shovels and things angrily in a bucket.

“See you tomorrow.” she smiled and waved goodbye. Those poor birds, locked away in their cages. Gilded as they may be, they were still cages. The curly girl pulled up the strap of her torn dress gossamer cotton and slid it’s matching shawl over her darkly tanned shoulders. “To the library?” Miss Giddy pulled on her own shawl and led the way to Immortam Joe’s odd collection of books. They ranged to anything from a fifty-year-old yellow pages to an original print of To Kill A Mockingbird, Joe collected anything and everything he could find. All of the people from the old world did. Trying desperately to piece together the shattered fragments of their bright and splendid past. It was better to have never known the green because then the sand isn’t half as bad. Though Chiara was sad to look at the death she was not half as sad as anyone who had known the life. This was the new world, after all, a world of petrol in drinking water, a world of gangs and slaves. Of five wives hidden behind six inches of steel.

“You have heard what Furiosa is planning?” Miss Giddy muttered into a brittle copy of How to be Popular with Boys. The younger was in the middle of scanning the listings for piano teachers in the 1995 Yellowpages.

“I have, it’s suicide. Joe will follow her.”

“Will you go?” Chiara smiled at her.

“I will.”

“That’s my Chiara, be free of that lecherous worm, run to the Green Place on Furiosa’s War Rig.” Miss Giddy smiled happily and pat her rosy cheek.

“When is the next bullet run?”

“Weeks time, Furiosa will take the wives, you will go too.” Miss Giddy looks down at Chiara’s bare feet, black from the dirt and stone. “I will give you shoes, and guns and bread. You will be safe, won’t you? You will listen to Furiosa, do as she says.” Chiara laughed at her and set down her book.

“We will be riding to the dawn, Miss Giddy, there is no Joe and no Rictus in the desert, and no reason to be afraid.” the old woman smiled at the young girl, and took Chiara’s cheeks in both of her wrinkled hands, pressing their foreheads together. The women stood silent for a while. Reflecting on their sixteen years together. The many times Giddy had hidden Chiara from the fury of her father and brothers. This girl, this sprouting, she needed to grow. They were interrupted by the heavy metal footsteps of Joe.

“Ah… Miss Giddy.” he nodded to acknowledge his daughter. She looked too much like his wife. Reminded him of the old world and better things already past. Not like Rictus, who reminded him only of his empire. Chiara stood frozen as she watched Joe scan the shelves for whatever he was searching for. Too many times had Chiara been under his heavy unforgiving hand, too many times had Joe indulged and called his daughter by her mother’s name. Never again. She hadn’t been alone in a room with him for two years, afraid of what he would do. Joe did have some shame, not much, but some. Enough to keep from raping his daughter in front of his youngest son and her surrogate mother. She muttered a half-formed excuse and fled from the oppressive weight of that room and the nightmarish memories that her father always brought her.

The day going forth was peaceful, as was the night. Hot as always, Chiara sweat on her cotton pillows. Not even the night was enough to keep the sun from her room. She had hoped to go with Furiosa, to find the many mothers. Where women were more than breeding stock for unrighteous men and rotten half corpses. Where they were nurtures and life-givers, where that was understood. Instead, she was taken. It was the dead of night and her body was taken by fever. She had gone to the kitchen to brew tea and had found scavengers, their hands and robes stained by war boy blood, stealing bullets from the armory. She was stupid, she had spoken. Her mind was hazy and altered, body wracked by shivers and cold sweats.

“Who are you?” Chiara asked in a small voice. She could hardly see them when they caught her.

In the night Chiara coughed blood. Her lungs were sore and aching. The old world doctors had told her that she had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, her mother had died from a fit, lying facedown in a pool of blood. She rasped a plea for water. It was brought to her, cool and clean, she gulped it down, searching desperately for anything to soothe her raw throat.

“They will come for me.” she warned when her coughing had stopped. Her body was sore and tired but she still spoke. “Be careful, they will come for me.” there was no answer and she knew there wouldn’t be one. So her eyes shut and she slept. Maybe there would be an answer tomorrow.

___

“I don’t care _when you last saw her!_ I want to know where she is now! Where is my daughter?” the War Boys who had been in charge of watching her door could do nothing but tremble. They were fresh blood, barely eighteen. Chiara had given them kisses when they were pups, they looked the other way when she chose to wander the Citadel. They hummed and purred like an engine when she paid them compliments. It was easy for the young Chiara to get the pups to turn of her father. It was when they were older, tall and pumped full of testosterone that they saw the appeal of V8.

“We don’t know, Immortam Joe, she went to make the tea stuff, and she never came back.” Joe growled deep in his throat and yelled for the Magister.

“Send out your boys, bring her back to me!” Joe kneeled over, slamming into the wall as his lungs went into spasms. He could feel it, the warm slick of blood coating his throat. “Go!” he yelled again when the boys came to help him instead of following his orders. They did as he said, scrambling off down the hallway. “Cloud!” he yelled, it was hard to imagine a monster crying. But the women, the girls pups, carrying buckets of wash and baskets of cactus fruit saw it. Halting in the hall and watching in wonder as a monster shed a tear for his daughter. His daughter who he loathed and loved in hideous inexcusable ways that only a monster could ever think of. And the monster, he cried.

When Magister Dyno came stomping to the garage the buzzing of saws and sparking of engines ceased. The skeletal faces of the boy turned up to the Magister, there was no whispering, they just stood silently and waited.

“Cloud’s taken, scavengers came in the night, took her, you.” he pointed to the pup he had trained, it was a pair of them now. Slit and Nux. “West.” he said simply, and that's all they needed. The boys chirped happily, scrambling to shut the lid of Nux’s car and get inside it. Dyno chose seven more and sent them off. He got on his motorcycle and revved the engine, grinning as it came to life between his legs, rumbling and purring like a woman. He mounted it easily and gave a grizzly shout, setting off out of the garage. The shouts of the war boys followed him as he and the eight search parties disappeared into the orange dunes, kicking up rusty sand under their wheels. Slit whooped excitedly from the back of Nux’s car, jumping and jostling the metal box. They were driving west, the clouds of rust dust all but gone from his sight. The desert was good at wiping away traces of people. You could exist, then five seconds later no one would remember you had ever been alive. He knew the scavengers who came to take weapons. He pitied them. They lived in desolate sea towns miles away from the Citadel, starving lepers with no Gas Town, no chance for Valhalla. Immortan Joe had told them they were weak heathens who could never go to Valhalla if they were witnessed a thousand times. Nux couldn’t imagine such a thing. He lived for Valhalla, he lived to die. He might have thought that sad several years ago, before he was Nux and before he had his first taste of chrome. But no more, Valhalla was good reason for death, as would be the discovery of the princess, the one they called Cloud. Nux felt himself smile thinking of her. He had never met her, he had never been part of her entourage, but all the boys were jealous of those who were. They were well fed, given water and those round orange things whose juice dribbled down your chin when you were too enthusiastic about eating them, wiping away the white. She had always been beautiful. She was born a month before he was taken and brought to the Garage. Small and dainty, reaching up with fat fingers like grabbing for people that weren’t there. They were both babes in service of Immortan Joe, and she was always clothed in Red. Red red red, it became his favorite color. The princess of the Citadel, sitting high in her tower. The older boys, who had been in the world before, told him that princesses were always in towers, waiting idly for a prince to rescue them. Nux could save her, he knew he could. He might not be a prince, but he was fast and chromed up, if he revved his engine, wiped his mind free of anything but her, he could do it. And he would.


End file.
